medley of veg (part II)

jackie forcibly dragged lee to john and angie’s house (a couple of their friends), screaming into his ear all the while ‘look what you’ve done to your sister!’ i then had to endure about half an hour of profuse apologies from him. i just wanted him to go away. he was incredibly drunk and very embarrassing, and birthday or not, he was out of order. strangely, even after all this, i didn’t really want to go home. i wasn’t all that bothered. still, i could hang around with the other people there and avoid him if i so wished.

i came down from the bathroom, having dried my tears only to be confronted by tarin’s tears, as her bag had gone missing during the scuffle and everything was in it (her house keys, purse, mobile phone, the lot). i went into the kitchen and managed to get in on a bit of the pot they were smoking. this is quite a fine art, and was so demonstrated in the film human traffic. no-one can blatantly ask for some, as the trick is getting involved in the conversation. rather bizarrely, this one was about bi-polar disorder (which, in truth, i don’t know that much about).

lee’s girlfriend, joanne: so what is it she’s got exactly?
guy i’d never seen before with joint: bi-polar disorder. she’s had it for a while now but it’s getting particulary bad.
me:what is it she has?
guy with joint: bi-polar.
me: oh, bi-polar! the thing is with a condition like that is that you’re caught between wanting to stop how you’re feeling, but then facing up to the fact if you take tablets for it you become ‘dead’ inside and you stop feeling like you’re ‘you.’

[general murmurs of agreement. i get passed the joint.]

random girl: yeah, my friend’s mum had it and that’s exactly how she felt. maybe it’s sometime better to just face up to how you are.

[i pass it to her. i bugger off.]

suddenly, i started to feel really cold, so i snuggled up on the settee under jackie’s coat and she came over to talk to me. her boyfriend passed her something which she bit in half, and passed the other half to me. i was sober enough to know what i was doing but heady enough to silence my sensible side (the little angel on my shoulder was a bit drunk on tequila, the poor thing), so i swallowed it. and i thought ‘blimey, my first ever class a drug.’

my brother kicked off a bit when he found out. lee said ‘jackie, have you just given my sister half a pill?’ she was very apologetic when she found out i hadn’t taken it before. i was just sat on the sofa silently shitting myself (only metaphorically mind, i wasn’t that far gone). it didn’t help that i suddenly got a bad headache (death by dehydration), and had to start sipping water (death by over-hydration) and take a couple of nurofen (death by deadly cocktail of ecstasy and ibuprofen). i asked jackie how long it would take to kick in, she wouldn’t tell me, so i asked nick – he said ‘about half an hour to an hour.’

so i waited.